


sore losers

by gortysproject



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: AI characters, Controlling behaviour ?, Dealing with Nightmares, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Isolation, Kepler's Eight Properties Stationed In International Waters, M/M, Tags Might Be Updated, This fic started off as a joke how did I get to seriously writing it, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms In General
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-01
Updated: 2017-07-07
Packaged: 2018-11-21 17:15:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 10
Words: 18,145
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11361960
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gortysproject/pseuds/gortysproject
Summary: When Kepler dies unexpectedly on a mission gone wrong, the only thing less expected is for Jacobi and Maxwell to become the recipients of his will. He leaves them one thing - or, eight things, really, and it's up to them to figure out what they're for, what Kepler expected of them, and how he can create even more mysteries after his death than during his life. Plus, a lifetime supply of peaches, Goddard lawyers, property-owning millennials, and Maxwell’s awful impersonation of Kepler’s accent.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> this started off as a joking au that i was chatting to @colonelkepler about on skype, and then devolved into something... actually serious... so let's see how this goes? this is technically a writing prompt from some tumblr post about "my uncle died and left me eight labs stationed in international waters" but i can't find the original post so :( but enjoy this anyway!!

Jacobi forgot to switch on the light in the office again. Now he’s hunched over in front of his laptop, sat at a desk that feels slightly too tall, in a chair that feels slightly too big, pushing his glasses up his nose as he taps away at his keyboard obsessively. When the sun was up, and streaming through the window, he had enough light. A quick glance to the clock tells him that the sun likely set at least three hours ago. He’s not sure why he hasn’t been kicked out of the office.

Perhaps Cutter’s authorised his overstay – after all, he’s got _so much to catch up on, haven’t you, Daniel_ , and he hears Cutter’s eerie voice in his mind reciting the long list of jobs to get squared away before he can start the process of picking someone to replace Warren Kepler, Director of Intelligence.

Maxwell suggested _Jacobi_ might be on that list, the one time they spoke in the last four days. He chuckled. He’s a ballistics expert, not a corporate spy, no matter how much of Kepler might have rubbed off on him over the years, and Cutter knows as much. Whoever his new boss is, they’ll be imported from another section, a different division, perhaps even another _company_.

One thing’s for certain – Cutter, just like everyone else who worked with Kepler, had never considered the possibility that he might actually _die_.

As Jacobi’s mind starts to wander, he compensates by picking up the speed with which he types. Maxwell might be impressed if she could see him now; he could be on his way to reaching her average speed. Typing faster, however, does not stop him from thinking about what happened, about how he wasn’t there, how Kepler died alone on a tiled floor with a single gunshot to the back of his head and _Jacobi wasn’t there –_

He keeps typing.

Cutter needs completed reports, wiped files, and clean slates before he can assign the role of Director of Intelligence to someone new. Jacobi, as Kepler’s lucky right-hand man, has been given the task. Personally, Jacobi prefers to mourn by digging into prototypes and burying himself in the work he actually came to Goddard to do, but fate won’t allow as much for him. He stores mourning for later.

His fingers slip on the keyboard, shaking, and he wonders if he’s started mourning already after all.

The screen illuminates his face in the dark room, and if he were wiser he might get up to switch on the light, but he doesn’t. He keeps writing, keeps deleting, keeps wiping. Until the light switches on _for_ him.

Jacobi flinches when the room floods with light, and he sees Maxwell at the door, hand lowering from the switch and other hand carrying a plastic bag and an envelope. She winces apologetically at his reaction to the sudden burst of brightness, but strides forward nonetheless, dumping the bag on the desk in front of him.

“Takeout?” he asks, guessing by the scent that follows, and she gives a curt nod, kicking a chair out to collapse down into.

Dropping the envelope on the table next to the bag, she tells him, “I got kicked out of the lab.” There’s something petulant in her tone. “When are they gonna get that if I want to hole myself up in my office for several days, _I’m gonna do it_.”

“Burying yourself in your work,” Jacobi replies monotonously, wishing he could ignore the food in front of him and reaching out to pull it out of the bag anyway. “Little cliché.”

“Says the guy trapped in Kepler’s office four hours after his day ended,” Maxwell says promptly, strangely energized as she reaches for her own food and tugs the lid off the box. “When’s the last time you ate?”

After a pause, he shrugs. She huffs. Raising an eyebrow, Jacobi asks, mouth already full of rice, “You?”

After another pause, she also shrugs. It’s his turn to huff.

“Can’t believe they let you use Kepler’s office,” she mutters, and he hums in acknowledgement. It made sense at the time – Jacobi’s home in this building is in weapons R&D, which is hardly the environment for filling out paperwork. Kepler’s office is empty. Obviously.

“What’s that?” he asks, forcing himself to get his voice to sound at least slightly interested as he nods his head to the envelope Maxwell dumped on the desk a moment before.

She glances at it. “Oh,” she says, and her voice sounds a little strange. “That’s… it got dropped off for me. For us. It’s for both of us.” At Jacobi’s head tilt, she continues, “It’s… a will.”

“A will.”

“Kepler’s will.”

“Kepler had a _will_?” Jacobi shuts his laptop. The paperwork can wait for a moment. “What’s he gonna leave us, his favourite gun? A painting of himself? The lifetime supply of peaches he won from that one _long story long_?”

Maxwell snorts. “I dunno, but it’s ours.” She hesitates. “I thought you might wanna open it – since, you know.” _Since however much I’m hurting, it can’t even be the tip of the iceberg for what you’re going through._

In response to her kindness towards him, Jacobi rolls his eyes, stuffing his forkful of chicken in his mouth and holding the fork there with his teeth as he reaches over to snatch the envelope. Maxwell glares at him.

“You’re not gonna wait until we finish eating?” she asks, lip curled in disdain. “You know, make us think about it, stretch it out, add to the drama…”

“Wow, maybe Kepler left you his _personality_ in the will,” Jacobi replies drily. He’s already ripping open the envelope, tugging out the paper and unfolding it to scan quickly over the small, dull text of a legal document. In the back of his mind, he notices that the envelope is heavier than it should be, and something is still inside it.

He reads aloud, with a smirk in his voice, “Alana _Sarah_ Maxwell.”

She flicks rice at him. “Just read it, idiot.”

Grimacing, Jacobi wipes the rice off his shirt before continuing. “Alana Sarah Maxwell and Daniel – Daniel Jacobi,” he reads out. “You –”

“What’s your middle name?” Maxwell interrupts. Jacobi tries to ignore her, and she kicks him under the table. “ _What is it_.”

“I don’t have one,” he replies smoothly – a lot more smoothly than he stumbled over reading out his own name moments before. “Anyway, shut up, this is a solemn moment. You’re stepping all over Kepler’s memory, right now.”

He clears his throat, returning to the paper. “You’ve received this letter because… blah blah blah… uh… Warren James Kepler, yeah, that’s him, sure… do you think someone internal wrote this? Kepler wouldn’t have just gotten some dumb nobody to write his will, right –”

“Daniel,” Maxwell hisses, “ _focus_.” She’s leaning forward now. “I just wanna know if we got anything cool.”

He glares at her for a moment, sullenly returning to the will to read through silently until he finds – “ _Aha_ ,” he mutters, eyes following the sentence to its prize. “You have together been left ownership of…”

He pauses. And re-reads it. And, eventually, says, “What the fuck.”

“What!”

Jacobi pushes his glasses up his nose, re-reading it again. “We’ve been left ownership of, uh, _eight_ properties.”

“Holy shit,” Maxwell says. Then, “Holy _shit_.”

“Yeah, except it’s weirder. They’re all in the middle of the goddamn ocean.” He reads it a third time. “Eight properties stationed in international waters. It gives some coordinates, apologises for –” He snorts. “For not being able to provide us with an actual address, but the properties technically don’t have one. And the properties…” He trails off, slightly disappointed. “Have no monetary value, as they don’t legally exist.”

Maxwell scrunches up her nose. “So, definitely a Goddard lawyer.”

“Agreed.”

They sit there in silence for a long moment, Jacobi picking up his fork to shovel more rice into his mouth – he hadn’t realised how hungry he is until he started eating – and thinking about their new property ownership.

Maxwell’s the first to speak. “Sooo,” she starts, and Jacobi can hear how unnerved she is by the sound of her voice. “Turns out it’s not that hard after all to be a property-owning millennial. Just so long as you’re, you know, ready to ditch your entire life and live in the middle of the ocean. That’s cool.”

Jacobi’s only response is a huff. His eyes flick back to the letter. “Eight,” he says, more to himself but loud enough for Maxwell to hear. “Why _eight_? Why did he have _eight houses_ on top of the sea in the first place – and why is he giving them to _us_?”

“We’re probably missing something,” Maxwell concludes, rubbing her nose. Jacobi subconsciously copies her, glasses lifting slightly. “Maybe we’ll get there, and when we walk in, there’ll be a hologram of him being like –” Jacobi prepares himself for Maxwell’s awful impersonation of Kepler’s accent, but apparently, he doesn’t prepare himself _enough_. “— _Daniel, Alana, if you’re receiving this message then I’m dead_. Then he’ll give us a list of people he wants us to kill for him that wronged him back in high school, or something.”

Leaning back in Kepler’s chair, Jacobi listens to Maxwell distantly, but he’s distracted quickly by the lingering scent of Kepler’s cologne still pressed into the chair’s leather. His gut twists slightly. “You think it’s a clue,” he says, and she nods.

“Or _something_. Something more than… a bunch of houses on the high seas.”

“So, do we go?” Jacobi asks, uncertain, picking the envelope up again to find a key card in there that is undoubtedly mentioned in the letter at some point as the key into their eight new houses.

Maxwell scoffs. “ _Duh_.”

Jacobi glances back to his laptop. “I’ve still got a crap-ton of work to catch up on,” he starts, but Maxwell lifts a finger up to stop him from continuing with his sentence.

“Your job is to clean up any loose ends Kepler’s left lying around, right?” she asks. Jacobi nods. “Well – this is the biggest loose end ever! Just tell Cutter it’s for that, and that you’ll get the rest of the paperwork done when you get back.”

Hesitating, Jacobi’s gaze moves from the key card in his hand to the closed laptop. He closes his eyes, sighing. They both already know what he’s going to say. Any chance Kepler’s left him something more, _anything to hold onto_ …

“Fine,” he mutters, and Maxwell victoriously stuffs chicken in her mouth.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello!! i just wanted to let you know that there will be in absolutely No Way a regular update schedule for this fic. i'm sorry i'm awful like that <3

The journey is… rough. It’s not that Jacobi isn’t qualified to fly the helicopter, he just doesn’t fly like a man who wants to land in one piece. Maxwell screams a lot. Jacobi cackles a lot. The helicopter hurtles through the air for _hours_.

At some point, they don’t die, landing on the roof to one of the houses _relatively_ steadily. For several seconds, Maxwell doesn’t move, staring at the sea ahead of them with something akin to pure shock painted across her features. Jacobi grins at her. “Milady,” he starts, and she snaps out of her stupor long enough to scowl at him. He ignores her. “We have _arrived_.”

“Who the hell gave you a license,” she replies monotonously.

Instead of answering, Jacobi climbs out of the door, jogging around the other side and opening hers with a flourish. He extends a hand to help her down, a mocking version of a gentleman; in return, Maxwell punches him in the face.

That’s okay. He can work with that. And as he reels backwards, instinctively reaching up to touch his battered jaw, Maxwell steps out on her own and slams the door shut behind her vehemently. “What kind of houses _are_ these, anyway?” she asks, the anger dissipating from her voice to be replaced with genuine curiosity – given a few more seconds to recover, the same question would have occurred to Jacobi.

The houses aren’t like houses. They’re large, cubical, pure white and buoyed on the water almost effortlessly. Each cube is at least twenty-five, thirty metres across, and just as wide, and they’re all connected together by glass bridges that run between them. The properties look _expensive_.

Jacobi’s suspicions are confirmed when he leans over the edge of the roof to look at the external wall, seeing the company logo carved into the white panel.

“These aren’t Kepler’s,” he calls to Maxwell, voice loud enough to carry over the harsh winds bounding off the waves crashing beneath them. “They’re _Goddard’s_.”

Maxwell frowns, a picture Jacobi is very familiar with – both seeing on her face and feeling in himself – and leans down to pull at what appears to be some sort of door in the roof. It stays shut. She fumbles for a moment with her jacket pocket, pulling out the key from the envelope and scanning it across something Jacobi can’t see from where he’s standing.

The door unlocks with a hiss. Maxwell tugs, experimentally, and lifts up the hatch. Walking over to meet her, Jacobi watches the steps unfold mechanically into the room below them, and then glances at Maxwell with an air of satisfaction before he steps down onto the first step. He descends, and Maxwell follows.

There are only ten or fifteen steps in total, but the moment Jacobi’s foot touches the ground below them, the entire room whirrs into action. Lights flood from the floor, the walls, the ceiling, illuminating the room in a clinical, white light. Mechanisms hum beneath Jacobi’s feet, and as the room comes alive, he sees something _incredibly_ familiar. A glance to Maxwell, and he sees the expression in her eyes – it’s like she’s coming home.

“It’s a lab,” she says, but she didn’t need to. It was clear enough. Consoles line the walls, and various desks cover the main room, littered with equipment Jacobi wouldn’t even be able to begin to try naming. It looks far more like Maxwell’s lab than his, endless computers switching on to run various signal output tests across their screens.

“All this crap,” he says, slowly, reaching to pick something up off a nearby desk, “this is all AI stuff, right?”

Maxwell nods in the corner of his eye, already making her way over to a nearby console. The room stands in relative silence for a moment, before the stairs begin to fold themselves up, retreating back to the ceiling in front of the hatch.

Jacobi frowns. “How do we –” he starts, wondering _how do we actually get out of here_ , but Maxwell interrupts him.

“Jacobi, this is all Goddard,” she says, confused, _excited_. “Kepler clearly wanted us to find this for – for _whatever_ reason. These consoles are outdated by years, and the lab itself must have been abandoned for a long time, but – this is still incredible stuff.”

“Cool,” Jacobi replies, eyes now fixed on a strange, chair-like contraption in the corner of the room. Something about it unsettles him. “You seeing the electric chair over there?”

He receives no reply, as Maxwell’s started typing, leading her one-track mind to focus entirely on breaking into the classified Goddard files. “Maxwell,” he tries. Nothing. “Alana?” Still nothing. He clears his throat dramatically. “Kepler’s here.”

_Still_ nothing. “Maxwell,” Jacobi starts, idly heading over to inspect the chair further, “you’re a terrible friend, and you’re not listening to me, and it would have been _super_ insulting if it _had_ turned out that by some freaky miracle Kepler _were_ here and you’d just _ignored_ him to –”

“Shut up, I’m working,” Maxwell replies swiftly, fingers still relentlessly flying over the console’s keyboard. Jacobi snorts, and sits in the chair, testing it out for size. It’s adjustable, but the last person that sat in it was much taller than him – _about Kepler’s size_ , he thinks, and immediately wonders why he knows so much about his former boss. Still, it’s not unlikely that Kepler was the last person to sit here – it was _his_ creepy sea lab, after all.

The typing stops. It takes Jacobi a second too long to realise, too busy reminiscing in Kepler’s chair, and why he was here, and what it was for, and wondering if he could _sit_ like him, if he could _feel_ like him, maybe the chair would be so kind as to take his mind back to Kepler’s thoughts, his life, his memories, and tell them what the _hell_ they’re doing in this eerie, desolate building in the middle of this eerie, desolate ocean –

“Jacobi,” Maxwell says, and Jacobi’s head snaps to her, shaken from his thoughts.

“Yeah?” he asks, and they both pretend his voice doesn’t crack.

He stands up from the chair, leaving behind the imprint Kepler left on this place ( _if it was even him, if he was ever even here_ ) to join Maxwell at the console. She points him to a file on the screen.

“It’s the most recent file on here,” she tells him. “Three years ago. This lab was being used to experiment on transferring organic consciousness to artificial consciousness through identifying the functions of the brain that were essential to construct mental states and replicating them through digital programming.”

“In English, now?” Jacobi replies, and Maxwell scrolls through what looks to be over a thousand words of a report to skim-read like the genius she doesn’t need to flaunt herself as.

“It’s…” She pauses. “The experiment was looking into a functional replica of the human brain as a computer to produce entirely autonomous consciousness – like an AI, like the ones we already know we can create – but from a mind that _already exists_.”

Jacobi blinks. Maxwell groans. “It’s like – okay, imagine your mind, the thing that does all your thinking – though I’m starting to wonder just how little that occurs for _you_ –”

“Hey,” Jacobi protests half-heartedly, and Maxwell shushes him.

“—The mind is a physical thing, right? And the human brain produces it because of the way it’s made and what it does – its _functional properties_. And any computer that mimics these functional properties can also create a mind, which is where we get AI from.”

Jacobi nods. Maxwell continues. “But imagine if we also had _phenomenal_ properties – mental properties that arise from the physical ones when a mind is created. So, the things in the mind that don’t make sense being entirely physical, like thoughts, and experiences, and whatever – all of those exist on a _mental_ level. Not inherently non-physical, but also… not _physical_.”

“Am I allowed to say I don’t follow?” Jacobi asks, and she shushes him again.

“If you were able to attribute the functional properties of the mind to a computer, while _also_ understanding and incorporating its phenomenal properties, you would – _theoretically_ – be able to digitally reconstruct someone’s brain _and_ mind as an AI. The AI wouldn’t just be your clone, it would literally be _you_ – the same you that’s in front of me, right now.”

“Sooo,” Jacobi starts uncertainly, “instead of _copying_ and pasting your mind, it’s _cutting_ and pasting.”

Maxwell looks at him evenly for a moment, and he wonders if she’s going to punch him again. His jaw still stings from the last time.

Eventually, she must conclude some inner peace she’s made with herself, as she only responds, “Yes, Daniel, it’s like cutting and pasting. We’ll go with that.”

“And this matters because?” Jacobi asks. He leans over her shoulder to scan across the screen himself, pushing his glasses up his nose.

“This is what Goddard was doing,” Maxwell replies. “This lab, it was dedicated to AI study, and the experiment was on trying to replicate a human mind as an AI while retaining their basic consciousness instead of creating another, separate consciousness that just has the person’s memories, and… stuff.”

Jacobi’s eyebrows raise fragmentally. Maxwell starts typing again, still trying to unlock something, open up a guarded area of the system. Jacobi merely watches her. “You think they pulled it off?”

In that instant, Maxwell breaks through the wall of code, and they both flinch as the lights in the room flicker for a moment. Jacobi glances at Maxwell in confusion only to find her mirroring his expression, and they both turn to the rest of the room, almost expecting Maxwell’s codebreaker to have unleashed something tangible.

Just as Jacobi turns back to the screen, a comms system crackles overhead briefly, before an unsettlingly, incredibly, _impossibly_ familiar voice streams through it.

“Mr Jacobi,” replies Kepler, “I _know_ they pulled it off.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> henlo, i'm Back, i hope i haven't disappointed you too much yet

“Holy shit,” Maxwell says, helpfully, before reiterating, “holy _shit_.”

“Dr Maxwell,” Kepler – _Kepler?_ – greets cheerfully in return. “You know, if I didn’t know you better, I’d guess my appearance had thrown you off your game a little.” There’s a pause, before he corrects himself. “Well, I can hardly call this an appearance if I haven’t _appeared_.”

His voice bumps around the room, from wall to wall, and Jacobi and Maxwell can only stare up at the ceiling in some vague recognition that this man is all around them, above them, _beyond_ them – Maxwell exhales shakily, and Jacobi swallows, and they pretend that this is far more okay than it could ever be right now.

SI5. Take what the world throws at you and throw it back twice as hard.

Jacobi clears his throat, and asks, not nervous, never _nervous_ , “Sir? Is that you?”

The comms crackle again. “Yes, Jacobi, it’s me.” Something smug laces Kepler’s tone – more so than usual, like he just pulled the ultimate disappearing act and _knows_ he’s the best magician to grace the stage. Jacobi knows it, too. The man just proved it’s possible to come back from the _dead_.

If anyone was going to do it, it was Kepler.

But Jacobi doesn’t feel like an audience member applauding a magician’s trick. He feels like the volunteer, standing on a too-hot stage with every light focused on him, a sickening dread in the pit of his stomach as he wonders just how the magician will turn him into the punchline of the next joke.

A hand reaches out to press against the console, steadying him, and Maxwell doesn’t even notice – she’s already facing the screen, typing rapidly, furiously, already at work with her genius mind and her sharpened gaze. “How,” Jacobi tries to ask, and it seems that for once – perhaps for the first time _ever_ – Kepler takes pity on him.

“How am I here?” he finishes for him. “It’s an interesting story, Jacobi. One of many results of trial and error from a Goddard experiment to –”

“To replicate a human mind as an artificial one,” Maxwell interrupts, eyes wide. “ _You_ were the subject?”

Kepler’s only response is, “You know I don’t like being interrupted, Doctor.”

A short burst of laughter punches out of Jacobi’s lungs. “Fuck,” he mutters. “It _is_ you.”

“I’m glad you’re so entertained, Jacobi,” Kepler replies, irritation edging into his voice, “but I was under the impression you actually wanted some answers as to how and why your commanding officer of _three years_ isn’t as dead as you’d previously assumed.”

Jacobi coughs, apologetic. “Yes, sir.”

Kepler hums his approval. “Goddard needed someone with enough fearlessness to make the neural connection and enough ambition to be worth preserving,” he tells them, almost proud – no, not proud, bragging. “This lab, along with every other lab here, was placed under my care when I was… chosen, for the project. It had never been considered an official project – in fact, I think it was marked down officially as a failure in company records.”

“But it worked?” Maxwell asks.

“Yes, Doctor, it worked.”

“But –”

“How?” Kepler finishes for her, again. He knows what they want to ask, what they want to _know_ , and Jacobi swears he’s just drawing out the answers because he’s enjoying the attention. Maybe he got lonely, being here by himself before they arrived. “It’s a relatively simple process,” he tells Maxwell, as they all know Jacobi would be entirely left behind in this conversation. “You see, I couldn’t have any technician making an AI of myself while I was still _alive_ – company policy states doppelgangers should be avoided at all costs. So, the agreement was that my mind could go through that neural processor – the one Jacobi was getting comfortable in for a while,” and both their gazes snap to the chair in the corner, “which identifies the non-physical parts of my mind and embeds a signal in my brain to be able to, essentially… remove my mind from my brain in my dying moments.”

Jacobi frowns. “But you didn’t have dying _moments_ ,” he criticises, still leaning heavily on the console (and this time, passing it off as a casual lean, instead of a crutch to keep him upright). “You were just – you were shot, and then you were dead. It was pretty goddamn quick.”

He’d know. He was there. He didn’t stop it.

A chuckle vibrates across the speakers, and something pierces through Jacobi, cold and heavy and sharp, as he realises just how much he’d missed that laugh. “Don’t worry, Jacobi, the technology was… _very_ _efficient_. The moment one body becomes uninhabitable, I transfer to the other.”

“So you came here?” Maxwell asks.

“So I came here,” he confirms. “It was a little dull, at first. I couldn’t actively interface with any of the built-in systems until the lock on my code was broken, which – that’s where you two came in. I needed to make sure someone would arrive to break the lock, and also… just, know I’m here. What happens next is a little up in the air, but, hell,” he chuckles again, “it’s not like I don’t have _forever_ to figure it out, now.”

Jacobi snorts. “You’re immortal.”

“Why wouldn’t I be?” Kepler asks in return, light, amused.

There’s still one major question on Jacobi’s mind, though. “Why didn’t you ever… tell us this was your plan?” he asks the ceiling, finally releasing the console and stepping forward. “You didn’t have to leave us a _last will and testament_ , you could’ve just told me – _us_ – that you were here.”

A long, calculated silence draws out between them, the seconds sliding into anxiety that curls in Jacobi’s gut as he wonders, _did he say the wrong thing? Does Kepler hate him, now? Did he expect too much of him?_ But after the moment passes, Kepler replies, evenly, “I didn’t trust you. I _couldn’t_ trust you.”

Both Jacobi and Maxwell open their mouths to protest this, but Kepler continues before either of them can make a sound. “This will? These labs? This is preserving my life, my mind, my _existence_. You two? Were my _employees_. The thought crossed my mind, Jacobi, but I couldn’t trust that my opinion of you wouldn’t change before I died. If I told you, and then you betrayed me?”

Kepler doesn’t answer his own question for a moment, and Jacobi instinctively wonders if he’s supposed to finish the thought for him. However, eventually, Kepler continues, “I can change a will. I can’t erase your memories. Your being in the know could have made things… _considerably_ more difficult for me.”

It makes sense. Jacobi relaxes, fractionally. He can deal with not being trusted; it’s a gift Kepler would never have given him fully, completely, when he was alive, and if he had then Jacobi would have only ever returned it with the receipt.

Maxwell is the first one to reply. “Well, sir… congratulations on not being dead?”

After a moment, Jacobi adds, perhaps too honestly, “It’s – it’s good to have you back.”

 

* * *

 

Despite Kepler’s death only being a handful of days ago, something inside Jacobi is still at war with getting used to the idea that he’s _back_. He’s sure it won’t take long to get used to having the same, near-omnipresent (scratch that – he basically _is_ omnipresent now) voice there to guide his every move. Even if it’s not accompanied with the same face, or the same scent, or the same slight smile that follows every appraisal, he’ll get used to it. Even if he can no longer shoot a gun side-by-side with him, or feel his firm hand clapping his shoulder after a mission gone right, or watch him tilt the neck of a whiskey bottle delicately over Jacobi’s own glass…

It’s still Kepler.

Maxwell gets used to this new Kepler within minutes, and Jacobi wonders if she even sees the difference between him as a human and him as an AI. Jealously, he leaves them to it, letting them talk about digital consciousness and neural connections and everything else he didn’t major in at college. Only, when he leaves the lab created to build biological and artificial links to turn people into AI, he finds himself in another one.

Then, slowly, he remembers the other _seven_ building-sized rooms connected to the lab they’d started in.

Then, Kepler follows him.

Jacobi isn’t sure why he didn’t expect Kepler to be able to access the other labs, but from the calm voice that follows him as he crosses the glass bridge into the next lab along, it appears he can after all. As the lights flicker on overhead and underfoot alike when he steps inside, Kepler asks, unassumingly, “Something wrong, Jacobi?”

“No, sir,” he replies obediently, and steps into the lab properly, letting the door slide shut behind him and instead focusing on the seemingly-endless shelves ahead of him.

Kepler stays quiet for a moment and only a moment. “I’m sure after Dr Maxwell’s thorough investigation into the technology behind this recent development in both her understanding of the world and her entire area of research, she’d be happy to join you in searching these other labs.”

“I’m _fine_ ,” Jacobi snaps, and bites down hard on his tongue immediately after. Kepler’s words have an angle to guilt Jacobi into being less self-centred, and Jacobi can hear it, but right now, he just can’t bring himself to _care_. But he straightens his spine after the outburst, an apology caught in his throat as he waits for Kepler to say something first.

Despite this, Kepler says nothing. Jacobi trembles minutely as he exhales. “I’m not – I didn’t mean, I just – this is still freaky, and new, and she’s so goddamn _okay_ with it.” He pauses. “And I’m… not.”

“Okay with me being… the way I currently am?”

“ _Yeah_.” Jacobi pushes his fingers through his hair, nudging the loose strands out of his eyes tiredly. “There’s no Dummy’s Guide to finding out your boss is a computer.”

Kepler huffs, amused. “A recent development,” he reminds Jacobi jovially. “I’m still the same person. Took extra measures to be certain of it, in fact. I think the real question, Mr Jacobi, is how similar _you_ are to _yourself_ from before my death?”

Jacobi catches a glimpse of himself in the reflection from the glass desktop – dark circles under his eyes, hands that tremble frequently, a gaze that doesn’t quite hold. He decides Kepler’s asking a good question, but it’s one with no need for an answer.

All of that will clear up when he gets used to Kepler being back. Given days, or even _hours_ , Jacobi will be good as new. He’s sure of it.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hold on for chapter 5, kids, that's where the Real plot comes in

The cursor hovers on the screen in front of Jacobi. It’s taunting him. He knows he’s done something wrong. Still, he tries again, leaning with the small of his back pressed into the side of the desk and saying, “I said, can you –”

“I heard you,” Kepler’s voice responds, crisp, clear, reverberating around the room icily. Jacobi winces. “I was just waiting for you to explain the moment I stopped being your commanding officer and started being your servant, Mr Jacobi, because as far as I’m aware, these developments have not –”

“Please?” Jacobi tacks on the end, throwing enough of an apology into the tone of his voice to pause Kepler in his tracks. “I meant, _please_ can you load up the listing on the lab? Because I can’t, and – you can, and I thought this was like a favour, not – not me being in control, or anything. Because I’m not.”

There’s a beat. “Because…?” Kepler drawls, stretching the word out.

_Because you’re a wildfire, and nobody could ever tame you, and you burn so brightly you’d incinerate anyone who tried in seconds_.

“’Cause you’re still my boss,” he replies casually, following Kepler’s game but with a voice airy enough to pretend he isn’t. Neither of them buy it. “Becoming an AI doesn’t mean anyone automatically gets to throw orders at you. Least of all me.”

“Good,” Kepler replies, voice low, and a shiver runs through Jacobi at the sound.

“But also, I’m not the one here who can make words appear on his face, so if you could –” The words start typing themselves across the screen before Jacobi can even finish, and his voice stutters to a halt, almost whiplashed by the change in direction. He exhales, quietly, a private moment of _lord, give me strength_ , and then starts to read.

Nearly two days have passed since Maxwell and Jacobi arrived to find out Kepler isn’t dead, and through this time, Maxwell has been almost exclusively stuck at the main console in the first lab, monitoring readings from Kepler and trying to understand the transferral of consciousness and other things Jacobi would happily leave her to do by herself.

However, for himself, and for Kepler, it’s been an opportunity to start rooting through the other labs and figure out what, exactly, they’re for. Some of them Kepler is familiar with – he did, after all, have a look around while he was staying here ( _years ago_ , he told Jacobi, who then found out Kepler has visited this place once and only once to integrate his consciousness with the AI system and never again). But despite owning all these labs, it appears Kepler never actually took the time to care about what they were doing.

“I had a _busy work life_ , Jacobi,” he said. “I didn’t have time to take a sabbatical to the middle of the goddamn ocean.”

The list finishes loading up onto the screen, and Jacobi scans through it swiftly, tongue sticking out between his teeth slightly as he pushes his glasses up to read the deductions made so far.

 

  1. **AI DEVELOPMENT LAB FOR KEPLER’S BRAIN THINGY**
  2. **THERE’S A LOT OF WEAPONS???**
  3. **BIG MACHINES, NO IDEA**
  4. **KEPLER’S STORAGE ROOM**
  5. **KEPLER’S STORAGE ROOM, PART TWO**
  6. **MARINE OBSERVATION DECK**
  7. **THE ONE WITH A HUMAN SKULL AND RAT FEET IN IT ALSO I’M PRETTY SURE THERE WAS THE FISH HALF OF A MERMAID**
  8. **THERE’S NOTHING EVEN THERE BUT WE HAVE A BEDROOM NOW**



 

“You know,” Kepler starts, “I could just draft up a version of this list that is actually, remotely, _slightly_ considered to be readable.” As he talks, the cursor begins to move, eradicating the list with a delicate precision.

“Sir, I call it how I see it,” Jacobi replies, mournfully watching his mermaid theory get erased before his own eyes. He waits patiently, though, if not a little sullenly, as Kepler gets rid of all his hard work and replaces it with reasoning.

Soon, the list looks… professional.

 

  1. **AI DEVELOPMENT LAB**
  2. **WEAPONS R &D**
  3. **PHYSICAL STORAGE ROOM**
  4. **DATA STORAGE ROOM**
  5. **MARINE OBSERVATION DECK**
  6. **FORENSICS LAB**
  7. **UNCONFIRMED**



 

As Kepler types, the lights flicker. Jacobi barely notices. “You left number three blank,” he tells him, in case the AI didn’t notice.

“I know,” Kepler replies, patronising. “That’s because I’m currently interfacing with the, ah, _big machines_ , as you called them. They’re connected to the main power grid, so I should be able to figure out what they actually _do_.” The lights flicker again. This time, Jacobi notices.

“What was that?”

“What was what?” Kepler shoots back, just as the door into the lab from the glass bridge slides open. By itself. Jacobi’s head jerks round to look at it, and he hears a crackly, irritated, “Oh, impeccable timing, thank _you_ –”

Jacobi looks back at the monitor. “Sir, what’s going on?”

“Nothing,” Kepler snaps, vehement enough that Jacobi steps back from the screen – not that it would have done him any good. Kepler’s voice glitched around the word, but as the door slides shut again and the lights return to their normal, clinical brightness, an alarm begins to blare.

Jacobi opens his mouth to ask what the hell that is, but before he can make a sound, Kepler growls, “ _Don’t_.”

Another voice joins the cacophony, a feminine one, presumably a remnant from the primitive security system that had been installed before Kepler arrived to monitor these labs. “Warning,” she tells them, monotonously, “air vents compromised. Warning, watertight seal compromised. Warning, air vents compromised. Warning –”

“We heard you,” Kepler tells her, calmly, a slight edge to his tone, “the _first_ time.” With a burst of static, the feminine voice cuts off, and a moment later, the alarms die too.

The silence that follows feels cavernous.

“Sir,” Jacobi tries, carefully, “are you…”

“Fine, Jacobi, I’m fine.” Kepler’s voice has already returned back to its confident, commanding tone. “ _Complications_ arise when a human’s mind is given control of an entire building.”

The word _complications_ is said venomously, as though Kepler would like to strangle his own human flaws and bury them twenty thousand leagues under until he could function like the robot he was, essentially, made to be. Jacobi holds his tongue, bites back his instinctive reaction – _no, sir, of course, sir, I shouldn’t have asked, sir_ – and instead asks, chin up, fingers gripping the edge of the table, “Are you good to do this?”

There’s a long pause. “Because,” Jacobi continues, nauseatingly uncomfortable with the silence, “I mean, Maxwell and I – we are kinda relying on you to keep this entire thing floating, and if you –”

“If I _can’t_?” Kepler asks, voice low again. It’s a different low, a dangerous low, and Jacobi feels his gut twist. “Is that what you were going to say?”

“I…” Jacobi has no good answer. No easy answer. No answer that won’t rain wrath down upon him.

“Because I don’t recall any of my capabilities – which are numerous and far-reaching, you’ll be glad to hear – becoming _any_ of your business.”

“I’m just trying to _help_ you,” Jacobi tells him, the words spilling from his lips before he can re-evaluate them. Something emboldens him – perhaps it’s the knowledge that no matter what Kepler threatens, he is the walls and the ceiling and the floor, not a real person in front of him, not anything that can push him against the wall and hiss threats at him until flecks of spit land on his cheeks, nothing that can leave bruises or give a disappointed look that Jacobi hates so much he feels sick whenever that gaze lands on him – or perhaps it’s simply that they both know, deep down, that Kepler is no longer Jacobi’s boss.

Whatever it is, it thrusts his confidence out into the open, letting him stand upright and tell Kepler, “I’m not your _enemy_ , Colonel, I’m your _friend_. And this is a lot – it’s a fucking lot, okay? It’s a lot for me, god knows what’s going on in Maxwell’s head, and I bet it’s a lot for you, too! And I – I can’t _do_ anything about that, I’m not an AI, but I wanna _help_ , ’cause I missed out on the chance to do that last time it actually fucking mattered – so I’m asking you, _are you okay_?”

With a shaky exhale, Jacobi stares at the screen, still blinking a cursor at him, and his shoulders slump. “I just watched you have a near-complete operational breakdown, sir. You don’t do that. You never do that.”

Silence.

“I’m… fine,” Kepler tells him. He’s speaking slowly, slower than usual, to the point where it sounds like every syllable has been delicately handpicked. “My mind wasn’t… made, for this function. It’s taking time to adapt my thought process to be more… _precise_.”

“Okay,” Jacobi replies, and then, “Okay. Cool. If it’s –”

“It’s under control.”

“Okay.”

Neither of them say anything for a moment, Jacobi’s heart still a jackhammer determined to leave a permanent dent in his ribcage, Kepler likely alone with his thoughts. Jacobi thinks over what he said to Kepler, tries not to wince as the words come back to him _– I wanna help, are you okay, I’m your friend_.

He recalls a mission they’d worked in Washington D.C., a year ago, where he’d watched Maxwell systematically remove selected memory files from a building’s AI program to allow other agents to break into the building itself and remain undetected.

If it would enable him to systematically remove the last five minutes of his life from his memory, Jacobi thinks being an AI wouldn’t be too terrible after all.

Kepler breaks the silence, but he does so leisurely, as though no silence had been there to begin with. “I have good news,” he tells Jacobi somewhat cheerfully. “Systems analysis seems to suggest that the machinery in the third lab seems to be for adapting matter to turn non-foods into foods.”

“What?” Jacobi asks, too surprised to remember how awkward he was just feeling. “We’re – no way. Goddard seriously just went _Cloudy With A Chance Of Seafood_?”

“I told you it was good news,” Kepler replies lightly. “Now, you might be able to eat some real food for a change, as opposed to –”

“—That’s not real food! It’s literally fake food!”

“—The twenty-three tubes of Pringles you and Maxwell thought to be a good diet to last on for _two whole days_.”

Jacobi only responds, “Sir, with all due respect, you forgot about the Twinkies.”

“No, Mr Jacobi,” Kepler corrects, “I only _wish_ I could forget about them.”

Jacobi snorts. Kepler brings up a new completed list of the labs, including the updated information they have on the third lab – the one that can produce food. Neither of them return to their previous conversation.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'm sorry i'm updating this so quickly i'm just Writing A Lot Right Now

The door to the first lab slides open, and Jacobi steps inside, confusion etched into his features as he regards Maxwell from her position at the main console. “Hey,” he starts, hooking his thumbs into his pockets. “What’s going on?”

What’s going on is that Jacobi was cheerfully asleep in the eighth lab – the designated bedroom until proven more useful for something else, given that it’s empty ( _appears to be empty_ , Kepler corrects every time, and Jacobi is beginning to wonder if he knows something that Jacobi doesn’t). With a couple of sleeping bags, some rolled up sweaters as pillows, and the temperature set to average, the room is a fairly comfortable one to settle down in.

So, when Kepler woke him up from the middle of his dream (mid-snore, which produced some sounds neither of them will forget in a while), Jacobi was ready to completely ignore him until Kepler told him, “Maxwell’s asking for you.”

Maxwell hasn’t spoken more than monosyllabically for days, now, so Jacobi takes the chance when it’s dropped into his lap to go to her – whatever she’s been working on since she arrived here and found out about Kepler, it’s clearly big. Kepler didn’t tell Jacobi. Jacobi never asked. However, after a handful of occasions where Jacobi had to physically pull Maxwell away from the console to try and make her sleep, or eat, or even shower (because, yes, there’s no bedroom, but they _do_ have bathrooms), the idea that she might be finished with this grand project genuinely catches his attention.

Even if it is three in the morning and he’s running on artificially-produced coffee.

“Hey,” Maxwell says, looking away from her screen to wave at him. “Sorry for the early start. Couldn’t wait.”

Jacobi walks into the room properly instead of hovering at the doorway, and it slides shut neatly behind him; Kepler is clearly following his progress across the room. “Okay,” he replies uncertainly, “you’re being super cryptic. Is this about whatever _thing_ you’ve been doing since we arrived?”

“Yeah,” Maxwell arrives, and then grins. “It’s super cool. Hold on.”

“Is it about Kepler?” Jacobi asks.

Maxwell hesitates. “Kiiiinda?” she replies, wrinkling her nose. “I mean, a lot of it was about rewiring the circuitry and testing his mind’s activity throughout the mainframe to see if I can isolate it and allow a competing program to take up the same space without overwriting him and – you know, killing him, but it’s fine, I sorted that out, and –”

“Waaaait,” Jacobi interrupts, “what do you mean, _competing program_?”

“I’m getting to that. Promise!” Maxwell turns back to the computer quickly, inputs a few indecipherable lines of codes which must command _something_ , but Jacobi has no idea what. He’s actually starting to get a little tired of being left out of the loop. “But other than that, converting the technology was pretty simple. The main reason uploading Kepler to the system was so confusing was because he needed to be able to be re-uploaded when he died, from a remote location, which involved a lot of neuroscience and a _tiny_ bit of brain surgery. But once the mainframe recognised his brain patterns, it was way easier.”

Like a good friend, Jacobi lets her talk it out. “So? Why am I here?”

“To witness history being made,” Maxwell replies, solemnly. Then she snorts. “Nope, that was way too – _way_ too cheesy. Okay. You’re here because I’m following Kepler in.”

Jacobi blinks. “Wha?”

“I’m following Kepler,” she repeats, “into the digital consciousness. Like I said, I had to make sure that uploading myself wouldn’t overwrite his personality from the system, so I’ve been, ah, making room for myself in the mainframe? And adjusting the tech to suit my brain.”

“But…” Jacobi’s eyebrows are drawn together tightly, creasing his forehead into a frown. “You’re not dead.”

“Astute observation,” Maxwell replies. “Ten out of ten, really.”

He glares at her, lips pressed together. “You can’t turn yourself into an AI because you have to be dead to go into the – you know, to change bodies, or whatever. That’s what Kepler said. One of them has to become uninhabitable to get transferred to the other.”

“What do you think I meant by _adjusting the tech to suit me_?” Maxwell responds, a smirk curving the corner of her lips victoriously. Jacobi knows that look – she’s smart, so smart, and it’s her _I’m being even smarter than usual_ look. The one that says she’s won.

Any other time he sees that look, Jacobi stands back and watches a master at work; he’s proud, normally, and ready to step out of the way and let Maxwell do what she can, do what she does best. Only, this time, he feels… concerned.

“You’re gonna put yourself in the machine that takes your mind out of your brain and sticks it on a USB stick the size of a house,” he says. “Which is a process that’s only been known to work once, on a dead guy. No offence, sir.”

“None taken, Mr Jacobi,” Kepler’s amicable voice replies.

Jacobi looks back at Maxwell. “And then you’re gonna… what, put yourself back in your normal body when you’re done? Isn’t it gonna be kinda _dead_ by then?”

“It’s gonna be kinda _comatose_ the entire time,” Maxwell shoots back. “Daniel, it’s fine. I’m not gonna _die_. I’ve got too many Pringles waiting for me when I get back.”

“ _Far_ too many,” Kepler interjects, and they both elect to ignore him – but not before Maxwell raises a middle finger to the ceiling.

Only, Maxwell’s promise has raised _the_ issue for Jacobi. The clench in his heart, the weight in his gut, the anxiety that follows Maxwell saying she’s going to _transfer herself into a digital consciousness_ – it’s all because he doesn’t want her to die. He didn’t realise, before, but it makes sense: Kepler died on Jacobi’s watch, and now he’s here. He can’t let Maxwell do the same thing. He can’t lose two friends, his _only_ friends, a week apart.

He doesn’t want to ask, doesn’t want to sound weak, but he needs to know. “Can you get yourself out when you’re done?”

If Maxwell heard the unnecessarily steely tone of his voice, she doesn’t react to it. “Yeah. I can. And I can’t stay in there for too long, either, since we don’t have the materials on hand to sustain me when I’m comatose.”

A momentary hesitation. Jacobi considers his options. Then, he pulls out a chair, and drops down into it, kicking his feet up onto the table and folding his arms. “Okay,” he says. “Go make history.”

Maxwell grins.

Jacobi reminds himself, while he watches her prepare the chair, that Maxwell’s a genius. She knows her limits. And she’s _earned_ this – having spent her whole life learning about AI, she’s now having the opportunity to _become_ one dangled in front of her eyes. For a brief moment, his brain tries to create a likeness between this and himself getting the opportunity to become a bomb, and he quickly decides they are _very_ different scenarios.

Still, he thinks he gets it. Research drives Maxwell in the same way that supporting Kepler drove Jacobi – a inspiring force, something to pull them out of the dirt and into the spotlight. Every word of praise from Kepler hit Jacobi just as any scientific breakthrough hit Maxwell, a blinding brilliant light that encompassed them and reminded them what they were there for, what they were alive for, what their purpose was.

Jacobi’s inspiring force might have uploaded himself as an AI onto a mainframe in the middle of the ocean, but Maxwell’s inspiring force is making her follow suit. Jacobi can’t blame her.

The process is a relatively short one – once Maxwell is in the chair, she adjusts the headrest, sticks pads on her forehead, the usual. Her hair is tied up out of her face, a look Jacobi’s always been fond of, before she switches on the machine.

The machine whirrs, for a few seconds, and then Maxwell slumps.

“Maxwell,” Jacobi says immediately, feet lowering from the table. “Maxwell?”

There’s no response.

“ _Maxwell_. Alana?”

“Hold on, Jacobi,” Kepler croons, voice soft as it reverberates around the building. “I’m sure she’s on her way.” And as he speaks, Jacobi sees her eyelids flutter, once, her fingertips twitching on the armrests – and he walks over, slowly, carefully, heart in his throat, fists clenched. _She isn’t dead. She isn’t dead. Dead people don’t twitch._

A voice in his mind reminds him that this isn’t scientifically true, not entirely, and he ignores it.

Just as he reaches the chair, the lights flicker, once, twice, thrice – then the room is plunged into darkness, apparently surprising both himself and Kepler.

“Hold on,” Kepler grates out. “I’m – I’m trying to access the –” His voice glitches, now, words that stutter and repeat themselves as he tries to regain control of the lights. They flicker again. He growls in anger.

“Sir?” Jacobi asks, groping for something to grab onto – he blindly finds Maxwell’s hand on the armrest and grips it tightly, unable to see anything in the pitch-black room. He reaches his free hand up to push his glasses up his nose, holding onto Maxwell and waiting for Kepler’s voice to stop glitching. It bounces around the room, haunting, terrifying, until –

Silence.

The lights power up, first from the floor, and then up the walls, and finally the ceiling, and it’s like something has awoken and taken control from Kepler; Jacobi can close his eyes and imagine it, this entirely, inhumanly powerful force stepping in and moving delicately but patronisingly around Kepler as it – _she_ – takes over.

Every part of Jacobi sags, slightly, immense relief flooding through him, when a new voice echoes around the room.

“Excuse me, coming through!” Maxwell trills. “Sorry, Colonel, it’s nothing personal, but you’ve _really_ made a mess of the place. Hold on – let me just…”

Jacobi hears something else power up, like a clean system reboot, and after a moment, Kepler’s voice joins them. Strained, he responds, “Thank you. _Doctor_.”

“So,” Jacobi starts, “it worked?” He lets go of Maxwell’s hand – the body’s hand – _whatever_ , stepping back and looking up. “You… that was _successful_? Seriously?”

“Oh, yes.” Maxwell’s voice seems to move _around_ the room, despite Jacobi knowing that she is now the _entire_ room. He decides to puzzle that one out later. She continues, excitedly, “I’m in the system now, Jacobi, and I can see _everything_.”


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if you're still here then all i can do is thank you profusely i guess

A thousand pieces are scattered across the countertop, bolts and wires and tools, and Jacobi needs them all. His brow furrowed, lips pursed, and knee bouncing underneath the surface of the table, he’s currently elbows-deep in a contraption he found hanging around in the lab Kepler has labelled as ‘Weapons R&D’, which he figured desperately needed opening up and peeking inside. Both Maxwell and Kepler know this position is one that Jacobi adopts when he is ready to go silent for hours at a time in concentration.

So, when he starts talking, they’re both somewhat taken aback.

“Maxwell?” he asks, glancing up from what he’s now eighty percent sure is supposed to be some sort of gun. Somehow.

The response is instantaneous. Maxwell’s voice, now taking on a robotic edge (just like Kepler’s did), echoes around the room. “Mhm?”

“How long have you been in there?”

There’s a pause. She doesn’t answer immediately, this time, even though she knows exactly how long it’s been – she could probably filter it down to the nanosecond. He knows the answer, too. _Too long_. “Probably,” Maxwell starts, slightly hesitant. “Uhhh. About. Nine…”

“Nine…?”

“Nine hours?” She sounds sheepish. Jacobi doesn’t care.

“Huh. That’s interesting.” He returns to his plausibly-a-gun device, sticking his hand back into the mechanism once again. “You know, didn’t we agree something? I felt like we agreed something.”

“Jacobi –” Maxwell tries.

He continues. “Oh, no, I remember. We agreed you weren’t gonna stay in there over five hours, ’cause we don’t have any way to sustain you while you’re comatose, and so you’re losing sleep, food, exercise… no, I remember, now.”

A sigh crackles through the overhead comms. “Fine,” Maxwell replies, haughtily.

“Don’t _fine_ me,” Jacobi snaps, and, with a pang, wonders when he started acting like her overbearing mother. “How long since you last ate anything?”

“Sixteen hours,” Maxwell shoots back, annoyed. “I’m doing _fine_.”

Jacobi looks up again. “Colonel?”

There’s a ringing silence that stretches seconds or hours, before Kepler calmly replies, “Jacobi’s right. Maxwell, go get some rest. And a proper meal. We don’t need you dying on us while you’re here – you’ll never be able to publish a thesis while you’re slamming doors in a secret lab.”

“I could totally publish a thesis from a secret lab,” Maxwell says, and then reconsiders her tone. “I’ll… I’ll go back to the bone body once I’ve finished this one process I’m still in the middle of.”

“ _Bone body_?” Jacobi hisses, nose wrinkling. “Come on.”

“Meat sack?”

“Nope, that’s – that’s worse.”

Maxwell chuckles across the speakers. “Flesh suit.”

“God,” Jacobi groans, “stop it. How about ‘go back to _normal_ ’?”

“That seems pretty Kepler-exclusionist,” Maxwell points out, and Jacobi hangs his head.

His hand stills in the contraption for a brief moment, before he finds the strength to raise his head again, staring up at the ceiling to glare at them both. “Okay, I have a question,” he says, changing the channel – only slightly, but enough. Before either of them can reply, he continues, “How long are we gonna be here?”

“I… don’t know,” Maxwell replies honestly.

“It’s just –” Jacobi withdraws his hand from the contraption, setting it down on the table delicately. “We came here to find out what the hell was in Kepler’s will, and it turned out it’s – you know, _Kepler_. Which is great! I’m glad you’re back, sir. But Cutter’s still waiting for us to get back. Hell, we’ve got jobs, and apartments, and _lives_ to get back to. And I’m gonna go a little crazy if the only company I get for the next six months is Jarvis and the plot of the next James Cameron movie.”

It seems neither of them want to respond to him, so they battle it out between each other, perhaps silently, through the digital hivemind they’ve probably created that Jacobi has no access to – just another thing for him to get left out of. “Here, I have access to incredible tech,” Maxwell says. “Like – _nothing the world has ever seen before_ incredible. The kind of research I can do here… I might need a few weeks before I can pack up. Preferably, a few _months_ , but you know. I’m flexible.”

“Additionally,” Kepler starts, “I hate to being up such a difficult point, but your helicopter is hardly enough for me to… _fit into_.”

“You haven’t even tried,” Jacobi protests.

Kepler stops him. “Actually, I have. I was able to interface with it – rather well, in fact. I can control the helicopter from where I am, but I can’t _transfer_ myself into it completely. It’s more like I’m holding the remote controller, rather than… _becoming_ it. Your options, Mr Jacobi, are to leave me behind, or…”

“Or stay,” Jacobi finishes for him, slumping slightly. “Right. Unless we came back for you – which is totally a thing we can do, right?”

“Yes?” Maxwell responds. “But it just might be easier to leave it for now.”

“You might not believe me when I tell you this,” Kepler says, lightly, “but Mr Cutter can and will wait for you. He knows about these labs. If he doesn’t hear from you in enough time, he will either assume the best… or the worst.” Jacobi sighs, and he can hear the smile in Kepler’s voice. “Job security, Mr Jacobi. You have it. He’ll welcome you back whenever you return.”

After a momentary silence, Jacobi picks up the contraption again, sticking his hands back inside it so he doesn’t have to sit there uselessly while his friends tell him what to do. “Sure,” he mutters. “I can wait it out a little while. We just – we should think about it at some point.”

“Of course we should!” Kepler replies. “And we _will_ , but only when we need to.”

It’s then that Maxwell announces that her process is over and that she’s going to head back to her _blood bag_ (and Jacobi shudders), before powering down. Jacobi wonders if he should head over to the lab next door to check she’s okay after the shift, but then remembers, Kepler _is_ in there. If Maxwell needs anyone, he’ll let Jacobi know.

Kepler speaks up, after the silence has formed a thick layer over Jacobi, suffocating him as he tries to concentrate on the gun – it’s definitely a gun, now, at least. “She’s been working towards a discovery like this her entire life,” Kepler says, and Jacobi grits his teeth, annoyed at how reasonable his AI boss sounds. “Give her time.”

“Since when did you become her biggest cheerleader?” Jacobi replies, and it’s a valid question. Kepler and Maxwell were friends when he was alive, but they weren’t _close_ – not as close as he was with Jacobi. Something ashamed curls up inside him when he realises he’s just jealous, but he ignores it, fingers curling into fists against the thought. “Is that it for you two, now? Since you’re both basically supercomputers, you – spend all night chatting, while boring human Jacobi does boring human things like _sleep_?”

“Jacobi.”

“Do you even need to talk out loud, anymore?” Jacobi asks, and that was the question on his mind this entire time. “Or do you just communicate telepathically, since your brains are practically getting _merged together_ –”

“We’re not telepathically connected and you know that,” Kepler retorts. “Stop acting like a _child_ , and leave the Doctor to her research.”

Jacobi exhales. He lowers his eyes back to the contraption, continues to fiddle with it, adjusting wiring and unscrewing bolts quietly for a few heartbeats before he mutters, “I’m just _worried_ about her.”

“Worried?” Kepler asks, and the word seems to echo tauntingly around Jacobi. “That must be a first.”

“Shut up.” The words have no bite behind them. If anything, Kepler’s response is relaxing Jacobi.

He can hear Kepler’s smile. “No, no, this is just… new for me. Human emotions really suit you, though, Mr Jacobi. I don’t think I’ve seen you with them too many times before.”

“Says you,” Jacobi replies, glancing up at the ceiling.

Kepler huffs a laugh, and Jacobi wonders briefly how an AI can even do that. Another question to never ask Maxwell. “But I’m not human, am I?” Kepler says, and Jacobi doesn’t respond.

He returns to the gun, instead, frowning at it as he unscrews something else to take a better look. The weapon – when in one piece – is the size of his arm, from shoulder to wrist, and it’s _heavy_. His eyes follow the mechanisms as he figures out what the pieces are all coming together to do, realising, suddenly – “It’s basic science,” he mutters, and then, “holy _crap_.”

Scrambling for the different parts dropped across the table, Jacobi starts to reassemble the gun, an urgency in his actions. Halfway through piecing it back together, the door slides open, and Maxwell steps inside shakily. Jacobi doesn’t look up.

“I might be a little tired,” she tells him, voice faint, and Jacobi only glances at her in time to see her pull out a chair, sit down in it, drop her head on the table and fall asleep. All at once. If he’d blinked, he’d have missed it.

Jacobi pauses. Kepler also seems to pause. “Well,” he starts, dragging the word out, “I suppose that’s Maxwell taken care of.”

With a snort, Jacobi turns back to the gun, continuing to reassemble it quickly. Once the gun is finished, he lifts it, inspects it, frowns at it, and then aims at the wall. And shoots it.

Just as he suspected, the laser hits the wall, singeing a significant crater into the surface and… setting it on fire. The overhead sprinkler comes on, directing water at the flames, and they die out with a hiss almost as soon as they appeared. This leaves Jacobi and Kepler staring at the blackened, smoking hole in the wall, before Jacobi stares at his gun again. “I _knew_ it,” he murmurs.

“Knew what?”

“Sir, it’s a – it’s a freaking ray gun. Laser gun. Phaser? Whatever you wanna call it.” Jacobi’s grinning at the clunky weapon, lifting it onto his shoulder and aiming again. “Look, it’s a goddamn laser, I can shoot through the wall if I just –”

“Don’t _just_ , Jacobi,” Kepler snarls. “Put the gun down.”

Jacobi lowers it, slightly confused, before he remembers that shooting the wall is equivalent to… well, shooting Kepler. “Right,” he fumbles, “sorry – I – yeah.” Placing the weapon carefully on the table in front of him, he adds, “But this is… so _cool_. I thought Star Wars got left behind in the _Cold War_ , but here we are.” He pauses. “Actually, a lotta the stuff in this place is pretty sci-fi, come to think of it.”

“What do you mean?” Kepler asks.

“I mean – isn’t it kinda weird?” Jacobi shifts in his chair, glancing upwards as he always does when intending to look Kepler in his metaphorical eye. “These labs have – they basically have the tech of the future here. Laser guns, a machine that can _make food_ , they even turned a person into an AI! And we’ve heard about none of it. Goddard Futuristics was doing some pretty incredible stuff with these labs, but whoever was working in them just… disappeared. Gone. Nada.”

Kepler pauses, thoughtful. “You think something more is happening here than we’re aware of?”

“It’s Goddard,” Jacobi replies confidently. “I _know_ something more is happening.” He hesitates. “When you first came here, were there people working here?”

“Yes,” Kepler replies, “there must’ve been… oh, four or five people to each lab.”

“Did you own the place when you got here?”

Kepler huffs. “Just been given the key before I arrived. That wasn’t to say that these projects belonged to me at the time – only that I deserved partial ownership of the area, since my brain was going to be the one theoretically uploaded into it.”

Jacobi spins round in his chair idly. “Did you get told when the experiments were shut down? Did you… know any of the scientists here?”

“No, and no. It wasn’t my business to know what was happening here and when, and I only met the lab technicians briefly.” There’s an edge to Kepler’s voice, now. “Jacobi, what are you suggesting?”

“I dunno,” Jacobi replies unhappily. “It just – it’s _weird_. It’s like these people disappeared overnight. Forty people, working on the most groundbreaking tech of the century, and none of them said a word about it to anyone. They left the place running on automatic, they left _you_ behind one protective wall of code, and none of these inventions ever made it to the outside world. That doesn’t seem off to you?”

“Perhaps,” Kepler concedes. “But one mystery at a time, Jacobi, don’t you think?”

Jacobi frowns, brows furrowing as he stops spinning his chair and glances up again. “What mystery are we dealing with right now?”

Kepler chuckles. “How to wake Dr Maxwell up and move her to your makeshift bedroom,” he replies cheerfully, “when not even blasting a hole in the wall was enough to make her so much as twitch.”


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is a shorter chapter than usual but chapter six was Fricking Long so this can jus even it out

The days that follow Maxwell’s initial AI conversion are mostly quiet. Jacobi notices the absence of his best friend more than he notices her omnipresence; something is different, cold, when he realises he is the only _functioning_ human person within hundreds of miles. Maxwell is there, talking to him, bouncing around him from wall to wall wherever he goes, just as Kepler was and is, but he finds himself missing her nonetheless.

The worst part, he tries not to think, is that Maxwell doesn’t miss him in return. There is something tired, sad, _regretful_ in Kepler when he talks, now, like being an AI isn’t all he thought it would be and he misses being alive more than anything. He seems to rely on Jacobi, as though he craves the touch of humanity, the confirmation of something that is real and human – but maybe that’s just what Jacobi wants. It’s always been his dream, for Kepler to need him.

He wonders when he became depraved enough to need someone to need him.

But Maxwell _did_ need him – only, not anymore. Now, when she’s human, he can see in her eyes that she doesn’t want to be. She can’t wait to eat, sleep, recharge, and then climb back into that chair and become what she’s always wanted to become. When she’s human, she seems to despise walking, talking, the physical effort put into doing physical things.

The other day, she was so overtired, Jacobi had to wrap an arm around her waist to help her back to their bedroom. He still hasn’t forgotten how she initially shied away from the touch.

There must be some cold irony in that – Kepler misses being human, and Maxwell misses being a mass of wires and circuitry. And Jacobi, try as he might to actually be a good person for once, is entirely unable to help either of them.

He buries himself in his work, too, then, because he has nothing else he can do. Most commonly, he’ll hide out in the lab with all the discarded sci-fi weapons, trying to sort through chemically-enhanced bullets that must be outlawed by the Geneva Convention and grenades that appear to set off an explosion of shockwaves instead of fire. Cataloguing every weapon that’s been left in this lab and their purposes, limits, and value is a better use of his time than fretting over Maxwell slowly killing herself or Kepler deteriorating emotionally.

Still, Jacobi becomes a hypocrite – there’s no other word for it – as his own care begins to slip. It’s easier to stay awake, grip his screwdriver tightly, grit his teeth against the tide of exhaustion than to fall asleep and again, _yet again_ , watch Kepler die. He decides his brain’s an asshole, and then he decides he deserves it.

Until one day, perhaps two or three weeks after they first arrived here because time stopped mattering a while back, Jacobi collapses.

Maxwell’s already fast asleep in their bedroom, refreshing herself for a stronger mind, healthier body, and longer duration she can spend in the chair come morning. Kepler hasn’t said a word in hours. Jacobi stands up to carry what he can only refer to as the gun version of a Swiss Army knife back to its place on the shelves, and then his knees give out.

He catches himself on the wall, sliding down it and landing on the floor heavily. The gun is weighty in his hands. A heartbeat later, Kepler’s voice echoes around him – “Jacobi?”

With a heavy _thunk_ , his head hits the wall, and Jacobi closes his eyes against the harsh bright lights of the lab. “Yeah,” he says, voice quiet even to himself. “I’m good. Just – taking a break.”

He waits for Kepler’s dismissive, unimpressed _just go to sleep_ , but it doesn’t come. In fact, Kepler doesn’t reply for a long time, and when he does, it’s to ask, “Can you stand?”

Jacobi’s heart jumps in his chest at the concern underlying the AI’s voice, and then his lips twist bitterly, because of course – of _course_ he’d be happy to kill himself slowly if it makes Kepler worried about him. Still, he tests his legs, decides he doesn’t want to even _try_ standing up, and then shrugs. “Give me a minute,” he says, still quiet, “I can… I can get up in a minute.”

“Jacobi,” Kepler says again, and his eyes flutter shut again at the sound of his name in Kepler’s voice, in that _tone_ , “you need to sleep.”

“I’m good.”

“I can read your vitals,” Kepler says without missing a beat. “From that alone, I can confirm you’re not _good_. You’re dehydrated, exhausted, and I believe it’s nearing sixty hours since you last slept. You need to –”

“I can’t,” Jacobi says, before he can stop himself. Jaw tilted to the sky, head resting against the wall, and arms beginning to curl around his raised knees, Jacobi exhales a brief, humourless chuckle, and repeats, “I _can’t_.”

Kepler pauses. “You can’t… sleep?”

“No,” Jacobi insists, more vehement than he intended, “I can’t, ’cause every time I try, I see _you_.”

The silence stretches out between them, a gaping chasm that Jacobi would rather like to throw himself into and fall to the rocks below, but he can’t do that since he’s so exhausted he can barely lift his _hands_. The fatigue is crashing down on him, now, his knees giving way opening up a whole flood of bone-melting tiredness that renders him unmoving.

“You see me?” Kepler asks, words emotionless.

“Yeah,” Jacobi mutters. “Dying, or whatever. It’s like, I fall asleep, and then you’re there, and I’m there, and I see you get shot, and…” He keeps his eyes shut. “I’m just tired of getting reminded of my biggest fuck-up, and I’m tired of watching you die.”

His voice cracks. Neither of them react to it.

But after a moment, Kepler says, “That… wasn’t your fault.”

Jacobi’s eyelids flutter open again, weary. “Thanks,” he starts, “but I don’t need you to –”

“That mission was my error,” Kepler interrupts. “I was the commanding officer, I got us surrounded, and I got myself killed. I consider it something akin to a miracle that you didn’t go down with me.”

Jacobi wants to tell him to stop talking, but suddenly his breath is caught in his throat and his tongue is as heavy as though it were made of stone, and Kepler is allowed to continue. “You didn’t suffer for the mistakes I made. For that, I’m grateful. It was annoying enough having to lose my body.” A pause. “It would have been… unthinkable, to lose you too.”

Despite his lips pressed together, despite his eyes squeezed shut, despite his furrowed brow and clenched fists and gritted teeth, Jacobi feels a tear on his cheek. His limbs are still too heavy for him to brush it away, so there it stays, trickling steadily down until it drips from his chin.

Then the floodgates open, and Jacobi does something he hasn’t done in years. He cries. Forehead dropping down to rest on his knees, arms curling round his legs tighter, and body trembling with effort he doesn’t have the energy for to hold back the tide, he _cries_.

Kepler says nothing.

When Jacobi raises his head again, seconds or hours later, the piercing bright lights have dimmed to a soft glow – maybe a sign of respect, or maybe just Kepler’s way of giving Jacobi privacy he hasn’t had in weeks.

Jacobi pushes his fingers through his hair, raking it back out of his eyes, and a wry smirk twists his lips – here he is, thirty-two years old and having a breakdown in an ocean lab about his dead boss who _isn’t even dead_.

Feeling raw, humiliated, and still so _tired_ , Jacobi stares at the wall across the lab from him. When Kepler’s voice starts up again, he flinches slightly.

“Jacobi,” Kepler starts, slowly, “did I ever tell you about the work I did in Shanghai?”

Jacobi blinks.

Kepler begins to relay a fantastical story. Jacobi faintly recognises it, the one about the triad and the chance encounter with the PLA – _yes_ , the story is familiar, but so is Kepler’s voice, soft and soothing and lulling him gently, carefully, to close his eyes once again.

He falls asleep, barely a minute into the story, cradled by nothing but a cold wall and a voice that he could never admit to himself sounds exactly like home.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is a dumpster fire of a chapter but i've been trying and failing to edit it for so long so i give up here u go

Everything begins to crumble when Jacobi finds out what’s really in the empty lab.

He doesn’t even mean to. Only, one day, when he wakes up, Maxwell isn’t in the sleeping bag beside his, and Jacobi doesn’t even need to hear her voice echoing throughout the labs to know that she’s in the chair, in the _system_. He opens his mouth to ask how long she’s been up, and then closes it against the question. He then opens it again to ask why she didn’t wake him, and closes it again.

Then, something inside him snaps, and he gets out of the sleeping bag, pulling on the hoodie he used as a pillow and heading over to the console built into the wall. Eight is empty, but it’s still connected to the mainframe, which means the digital controls run through the entire place, and –

Jacobi isn’t an expert in AI technology, but it doesn’t take him long to figure out how to shut the room off the grid.

“Jacobi?” Kepler asks, his voice appearing out of nowhere when he notices he’s awake. “What are you –”

The voice cuts out when Jacobi flips the switch. He exhales, and raises his head, flipping the switch back on.

Kepler’s ready to greet him when he does. “Did you just cut me off from Eight?” he asks, almost offended. “While I was _talking to you_?”

“Yep,” Jacobi replies monotonously. “Could you access the room at all when I switched it off?”

“No. No, I couldn’t, which is why you shouldn’t be –”

Jacobi switches it off again.

He exhales again.

He braces both hands on the console, the only thing marring the room from being a picturesque minimalist white cube and nothing more, and hangs his head, shoulder blades jutting out from underneath the entirely-unstylish and entirely-unlike-him-to-wear outfit. Hoodies are easy when you’re surviving on a wardrobe of three outfits. They’re also easy when the rooms are notoriously cold.

They’re also easy when you’re in mourning, and Jacobi’s a big boy who can admit that that’s what state he was in when he arrived here, weeks ago.

He spends the next few minutes feeling bad about effectively kicking Kepler and Maxwell out of his room, but not bad enough to allow them access back inside. There’s a constant overhead presence, an endless scrutiny of nobody _really_ being there but someone still watching you; Jacobi feels like he’s under surveillance from his own friends.

Staring at the console makes him realise that he’s never actually looked at it before – they just took the room at face value and assumed nothing had ever been here, and the console was just for basic mainframe functions, so there was no need. Looking at it now, however, Jacobi is realising that they might have missed something – there are files on here Jacobi doesn’t recognise, and buttons he has no idea about.

So, naturally, he presses one of them.

The bright lights switch off. Jacobi is plunged into darkness, but only for a moment, because soon after, he feels a whirring underfoot and watches different lights switch on in their place. _Black lights_.

With the black lights comes the writing on the wall.

The first thing Jacobi sees on the wall is a tally chart – five, ten, fifteen… he counts all the way to one hundred and eighty five. That’s not all that stains the walls, though – there are names with dates next to them ( _Penny, March 4 th; Maya, February 17th; Ben, March 12th_), as well as incomprehensible scribbles, things written in languages Jacobi doesn’t know and things which are distinctly English but make equally little sense.

Heart pounding, he presses the same button, and then another, and then a third when nothing happens, and eventually the black lights shut off and the normal lights are restored in the room. Jacobi stares at the wall for a long moment. Then, slowly, he turns back to the console, and realises with a sickening twist of his gut he’s brought up some sort of list of reports – probably from one of the random buttons he hit before.

He reads through them, quickly, skimming for any useful information. The reports were written by five different scientists, all outlining their work and mentioning any updates or discoveries, but they all end the same way – _we’ve lost contact with the mainland, we’ve been trying to radio them for months, there’s no way to get back, you’ve abandoned us_.

After reading the reports, Jacobi’s starting to wonder if the writings on the wall are actually gravestones.

Not bothering to pull on his shoes, he pads into the lab next door, immediately being met with both Kepler and Maxwell demanding to know why they have no access to Eight.

“I kicked you out,” he tells them, continuing to walk through the building because there’s no way he’d willingly stop for a chat in the _forensics_ lab. Jacobi might not be scared of dead bodies, but that doesn’t mean he particularly wants them around him. “And I know you’re both probably pissed, but I kinda want the privacy of _one_ room in this goddamn place not getting the full, omnipresent experience. Okay?”

Neither of them respond for a moment, before Maxwell says, “Okay. That’s fair.”

“Besides,” Jacobi continues, “I have better news for you. We’re actually in a horror movie and we’re probably all gonna die.”

“Excuse me?” Kepler asks, slowly.

Jacobi huffs. “The room – after I shut you guys off, I think I figured out where all the scientists that used to work here ended up.” He moves into the next lab, and continues walking. The AIs doubtlessly follow him through. “There were these reports, and a system of black lights, and… anyway, Goddard abandoned them all out here for months. They either went crazy and tried to kill each other, or they went crazy and tried to make their own boat to get back to the nearest mainland. Either way, they’re probably dead.”

He drops down into a chair in Four, and Maxwell says, helpfully, “Holy crap.”

“I know,” he replies. “Horror movie.” He pauses, and none of them speak for a moment, but Jacobi can’t take the silence for long and he can’t afford to lose his nerve. “Which is probably the big neon warning sign to, you know, get the hell out of here while we can.”

Kepler sighs, the sound laced with static across the speakers. “Jacobi, we’ve talked about this.”

“Yeah, I know, we talked about this _days_ ago,” Jacobi snaps. “And your reply was _we’ll talk about it later_. It’s _later_ now!” He shifts in his chair. “Look, how about – I go back to the mainland, you two stay here, and I come back with a way to get us all out. I’ll only be gone for a few days.”

“Why can’t you just _wait_?” Maxwell asks, annoyed.

Without hesitation, Jacobi shoots back, “Because I just found out that the last people who got cooped up in this place with no end in sight went _crazy_ , and if I don’t spend more than _five minutes_ around another human being soon, I’m sure as hell gonna start sympathising with them!”

He stands up, shoving the chair hard enough that it teeters dangerously close to toppling over for a heartbeat, and starts walking through the labs again – this time, with a goal. He’s heading for the helicopter. “I know you two are AI best buddies and you’re gonna conquer the goddamn world together,” he continues, voice hard, “so whatever it is you wanna do, you can do it without me interfering.”

Kepler’s voice breaks through. “Jacobi, wait.”

“No, I’m _tired_ of waiting –”

“I said _wait_.” The word is growled out, an order, and something deeply rooted inside Jacobi recognises that voice immediately. He stops automatically, a trained soldier, still under Kepler’s thumb whether he likes it or not, and _waits_.

Kepler’s voice softens. “Dr Maxwell,” he starts, “if I could have a moment with Jacobi? Alone?”

“Uh,” Maxwell says intelligently, and then, “sure, I’ll just – I’ll go back into the, ah, the body, just – wait a second…”

Jacobi stands in the middle of the room, still frozen in place from Kepler’s order – and his back is straighter, his hands by his sides, his jaw tilting up, _good boy_ – as they wait for Maxwell to transfer back into her normal body. Jacobi can’t tell when it’s done, but Kepler clearly can, and after a moment he continues, “Don’t… leave.”

“That’s it?” Jacobi asks. “ _Don’t leave_. That’s your pep talk?”

“It’s not a pep talk,” Kepler replies, choosing his words carefully as always, “it’s a request.” There’s a beat of silence. “I’m not your enemy, I’m your friend.”

Jacobi remembers those words, from days ago, blurting them out angrily because Kepler wouldn’t listen to him – so he exhales, forces himself to relax out of his military-esque stance, and grants Kepler the listening ear he himself had begged for all that time ago.

Understanding his cue, Kepler says, “Right now, while I’m stuck here, you and Maxwell are the only things keeping me sane. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that I’d have lost my mind a long time ago if I were here on my own.”

“Maxwell’s…” Jacobi starts, but Kepler interrupts him.

“Maxwell’s dedicating all her time to being the _one_ thing I don’t need a reminder of being myself,” he answers, before Jacobi’s protest is even fully formed. “I don’t regret this decision,” and Kepler’s voice hardens slightly, almost as though he’s trying to convince _himself_ , “but I am still… coming to terms with the limitations I face as an AI over a person.”

Jacobi hesitates. “What’s that got to do with me,” he asks flatly.

A long silence stretches out between them as Kepler clearly tries to find a neutral answer to a difficult question. “You are…” he tries, and then sighs to himself, restarting. “Maxwell spends far more time in the chair than out of it. It’s nice to have someone around who reminds me of… being a person. Human.”

Another silence echoes through the lab as Jacobi tries to process that. They’re the words he always wanted to hear – _Kepler needs you around, Kepler doesn’t want you to leave_ – and with a sigh that definitely did not tremble in any way, his shoulders slump.

“Okay,” he mutters. “Okay, I can. I can stay.”

“Thank you,” Kepler replies, and Jacobi almost double-takes at the words sounding genuine from him for the first time in Jacobi’s memory.

“You know,” he says, trying to lighten the moment because there’s an anvil tied to his heart and he feels like he might collapse from it, “my life would be so much easier if the two of you just accepted your own mortality.”

“I’m afraid I can’t do that, Jacobi.” Kepler’s voice sounds milder, again, amused, and Jacobi feels relief dripping from his bones that it actually worked.

He huffs in response. “You’re just the sore losers of life.”

“I’d like to think of us as winners, actually, since the purpose of immortality is that we never _end_ our lives.”

At that moment, Jacobi presses the palm of his hand against the wall. He thinks to himself, _what I wouldn’t give to be able to hold his hand for real,_ but slaps the thought away immediately; years of yearning for a touch Kepler never provided have already eaten away at him, and he can’t keep longing for it, not now that it’s physically impossible, not now they lost every chance they ever had to be _something_.

The wall beneath his fingers heats up, a warm surface as opposed to the cool one Jacobi initially touched, and he presses into it even more. He shouldn’t waste his time on a fantasy he knows can’t come true. He’ll do it anyway.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warning in the next chapter for plausibly traumatic stuff ... just pay attention to the tags on the fic

Kepler asked Jacobi to stay so he could remain in the presence of a real, human person. He needs something alive to be around, instead of simply staying trapped in the mess of wires he has become; he needs something organic and human in the way Maxwell often isn’t anymore. What Kepler didn’t consider was that Jacobi needs exactly the same thing.

The only other organic things around are the animal corpses in the forensics lab and the best friend who straps herself into a chair and stays there, comatose, for over a day at a time.

Jacobi doesn’t like the eighth lab, now. He’s never been one to scare easily, and it’s not the tallies on the wall or the haunting remnants of reports begging for his help that drive him out. But the room isn’t empty now, and he can’t bring Kepler and Maxwell back in to watch over him when he’s asleep. He locked them out.

He could reverse the locks, but then they’d know he wants them there, and _when did he get so nervous about what they thought of him?_

A lot of his time is now spent in the sixth lab. Six is not like the other labs, because they all stretch out in a line, connected by the same bridges and all structured as the same, white cubes, glaringly bright and glaringly cold. Six is cold, too, but for a completely different reason; Six is not made of white walls and floors, nor does it have the tables and chairs that most of the others do; Six is not bright. In Six, the lab named for marine observation, there is only a glass floor, glass walls, and a single console built beside the doorway.

Six is below the other labs, accessible from Five down a set of stairs, and snugly underwater no matter where the waves crash above.

Jacobi spends his time in Six because it is the closest he can get to another living thing. Maxwell gathers data for her thesis, Kepler keeps the labs running, and Jacobi sits on a glass floor, back against a glass wall, watching creatures of all shapes and sizes move around the tank.

There must be several inches of glass between himself and anything that comes close to the lab, but it’s the closest he’s felt to anything alive in days.

Maxwell notices his isolation, sometimes. “Sorry about being so distant,” she says, once, taking a rare break to join him in Six, real her, _physical_ her, sitting down beside him.

All Jacobi wants to do is hold her hand, lean into her warmth, press his face against her shoulder and feel the comfort of solid hands resting on his spine, but he can’t do that. Maxwell hates touching people, now. Touching _him_ , really – he’s the only person around. Ever since Maxwell started spending her time not touching anything, floating free and weightless and tranquil in a mindscape only she could access, being real and physical has become alien to her.

Jacobi doesn’t hold her hand, or lean into her, because it might make her leave. He doesn’t want her to leave. So, they sit together, watching the fish slip past, snorting in unison when an eel swims straight into the glass, listening to Kepler list all the names of the fish they see because he recognises every single one of them – not from his own personal experience, but from the database he has access to.

The database reminds Maxwell she has better places to be, better things to be doing, and she leaves Jacobi to it. Returns, soon after, a voice echoing around the room, but it’s not the same.

At first, Jacobi brings his sleeping bag down to Six because it’s cold in there, but then he falls asleep in the sleeping bag, and soon after, he never returns to Eight. At some point after that, Maxwell joins him in moving the bedroom to Six, probably because it’s closer to the only lab she has any interest in.

Jacobi pretends not to notice that she’s appearing to sleep less and less. The long hours stretch into a long day, and eventually, Maxwell’s pushing into forty-hour sessions with no sleep, no food, no water, _nothing_. Both Jacobi and Kepler have taken to reminding her that she has a physical form to tend to, a garden to weed.

Kepler stays with Jacobi no matter what. He tells him stories. Jacobi wishes he could pay attention to them. He misses easier days, when Kepler’s stories were murmured to him in the dead of night on a stakeout, or recited serenely over a glass of whiskey, or cheerfully elaborated on when his arm was wrapped around Jacobi’s shoulders and Jacobi could lean in, slightly, smell the leather of his jacket or the lingering scent of his aftershave.

He remembers one occasion, when Kepler’s story was slurred to him, the man himself on his back and Jacobi’s fingers pressed insistently on a knife wound that wouldn’t stop bleeding. Fingers covered his own, and Kepler said, breathing heavily, “Did I ever tell you about Santa Fe?”

He proceeded to guide Jacobi through how to clean and stabilise a deep cut with only his bare hands, a switchblade, and a sock, and Jacobi has never looked at him the same way since.

These stories have nothing of the same urgency as Santa Fe. These stories are relics, memories uncovered on the walls of ancient tombs, legends with no depth, no character, just a moral to the story at the end – and Jacobi always _hated_ hearing about the moral to the story at the end.

It seems Kepler himself is recognising that these stories are chapters of a tale that’s already ended, not introductions to action that will be reprised. Kepler may live, and live long, and live _forever_ , but without the pounding of his heart in every exhilarating mission and the body to fling in front of a bullet, without the thrill of the chase and the thrill of the fight, without the heavy weight of a gun in his hand or a hand in his own… both men wonder, and wonder privately, is Kepler really _alive_?

Whatever the answer to that question is, they both have to learn to deal with it, whether they like it or not.

Kepler is what he is. Jacobi is what he is. Maxwell is what she wants to be.

 

* * *

 

 

Jacobi wakes up from a nightmare, alone in Six, and gasping for breaths he doesn’t deserve.

Images are burned into his skull. Kepler, dead in an instant, a bullet in the back of his brain; nothing graceful or dignified in it, just a wide-eyed, unblinking stare, as knees collapse, torso falls forward, and head hits the ground with a sickening thud; lifeless, before he even meets the floor; avenged, immediately, by Jacobi’s thudding heart and enraged growl, by the finger that squeezes the trigger without a second’s hesitation, by the crumpling of more bodies, everyone in the room meeting the wrath of an angel with nothing left to lose.

Of course, Jacobi had things to lose. He had Maxwell to lose. He had his job. He had his life. But none of those things mattered to him when he dropped to his knees, gun discarded, tugging the body over and pressing a bloodstained hand to Kepler’s bloodstained face.

Jacobi held him, then, and ever since, he hasn’t been able to understand why. He held him close, held him tightly, pulled him against his chest, and exhaled shakily as the voice on the other end of his comms demanded, _come in, Jacobi! Are you there? Jacobi!_

He held him in a way that Kepler would never have appreciated when he was alive – softly, carefully, tenderly. Kepler wouldn’t have appreciated _any_ sort of mourning. Jacobi was human, though, and he mourned.

Jacobi is still human, now, and he wakes up, clutching his arms around his own chest and clinging to a body that doesn’t exist.

Kepler asks him what happened, what he saw. Jacobi tells him the honest truth. He still has to look at his hands, when he speaks, in case they really are covered in blood, in case he really _was_ there –

“I’m glad to know I was in such capable hands,” Kepler tells him, voice charmed, yet straining against the tide of emotion presented by Jacobi’s.

“Capable ones wouldn’t have let you get shot in the first place,” Jacobi replies.

All Kepler says in return is, “We all make mistakes, but I’m fairly certain I’ve already explained why this isn’t your burden to bear.”

So Jacobi drops it.

Later on, when the conversation is still stuck in his mind, when the _dream_ is still stuck in his mind, he says to Kepler, “We could’ve been something, couldn’t we.”

His tone is hollow, quiet, akin to stepping across a minefield and hoping to all hell that he doesn’t set anything off, before wondering if the explosion would be worth the burns.

Kepler replies, as sombre as Jacobi feels, “Yes, I think we could’ve.”


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> dear ai,   
> everything that happens in this fic was determined at least a month before i started writing it
> 
> dear everyone else,  
> THANK YOU for still reading this!!! this is the final chapter and i hooope you're not too disappointed. <3

Maxwell hasn’t left the chair in two days.

When Jacobi realises this, he sits bolt upright, and ignores Kepler’s surprised, “Jacobi?”

Instead of responding, he marches into the first lab with an air of indignance, demanding, “ _Maxwell_.” His hands come down on the desk in front of him. His lips press together tightly.

“Daniel,” Maxwell starts, “what’s wrong? I’m in the middle of something, right now, actually, so you’ll have to make it rather –” _Brief_. It goes unsaid as Jacobi interrupts her.

“It’s been two days,” he says, angry. “ _Two days_. You – you need to come back _now_.”

Maxwell’s voice is terse when she responds, “Like I said, I’m in the _middle_ of something.”

Jacobi’s about to snap at her, insist she comes back, get Kepler to agree with him, until he suddenly realises.

She _knows_ what the risk is of spending too long in the chair. She knows her body could dehydrate, she knows she could die, she knows _everything_ because she’s a genius of a person. And _she’s still there_.

He breathes in. Breathes out. Presses his hands firmly against the table. “You’ve been in there for two days,” he says, slowly. “Your body can’t handle any longer. I’m trying to keep you _alive_.”

Maxwell seems to cotton onto the new tone of the conversation, then, as she replies, “I _am_ alive. I’m more alive, in here, than I’ve _ever_ been before. It’s time you accepted that.”

“You can’t just let your body die!” Jacobi exclaims, all pretence of calm dissipating before his very eyes. “I need you here and I need you alive – _actually_ alive, properly alive, Alana Maxwell and not just some stupid robot!”

“I’m not some stupid robot,” she hisses. “This is everything I’ve worked for my _entire_ life – this is what I was _made_ to do. And I don’t know why you want to stand in the way of that, but frankly, it’s actually quite selfish!”

“I’m being selfish,” Jacobi repeats, disbelieving. “ _I’m_ being selfish? I’ve waited here for weeks! For you, for Kepler – I’ve been here this entire time and the _one_ thing I’ve blocked you from doing is _actively killing yourself_ , and that’s _selfish_?”

Maxwell hesitates. “It’s – it’s not like that. I’m not _killing myself_.”

“Get out of the chair,” Jacobi says, voice steady.

He receives no answer for a few seconds, and wonders if she’s actually transferring back into her human form, before she replies, “No.”

The word makes Jacobi see red for a brief moment, and he grits his teeth against the anger welling up inside him, pushing away from the desk and heading over. “Fine,” he says, voice empty, “I guess I have to do everything around here.”

“You can’t _make_ me leave,” Maxwell says.

“I can make you get back in your body and –”

“Jacobi,” she interrupts, “ _that’s not my body anymore_!” A pause. A breath. “This is who I am, this is who I _want_ to be, and I’m not going to keep some dumb body alive to try and make you happy. If you cared about me –”

“Don’t you dare.”

“—You wouldn’t _mind_ me being a ‘stupid robot’, which, by the way, is a _terrible_ insult, since as an AI I’m actually about a billion times smarter than you –”

“Both of you,” Kepler tries to interrupt, “be quiet and stop this _nonsense_.”

Jacobi does what he should have done days ago – he ignores Kepler. Approaching the chair, he stops in front of Maxwell’s slumped body, and glances at the ceiling again. “If you’re not gonna get yourself out of here – if you’re not gonna keep yourself _alive_ , then I’m gonna have to do it _for_ you.”

“Jacobi, wait.” She sounds more panicked now. He ignores her.

Kepler’s voice adds to the mess as he reaches for the cables, for the pads pressed against her skin, insisting, “Jacobi, you’re going to _hurt_ her.”

“Hurt her?” Jacobi asks. “I’m _saving_ her. Maxwell said she was connected to the body still, right? Which is why it doesn’t die the moment she leaves it. If I can just…”

His fingers wrap around the wire, and the last thing he hears before he pulls it off is Maxwell’s voice, echoing around the lab, glitching –

“Daniel, _please_ –”

The pads come off. The wire drops to the ground, coiling slightly, slipping out of Jacobi’s fingers. The voice cuts off abruptly, a haunting echo, and then Jacobi’s hand lands on Maxwell’s shoulder.

“Alana?”

She doesn’t respond.

An eternity later, Kepler talks.

“She’s not…” He sounds reserved. “Maxwell’s consciousness is no longer part of the systems mainframe, Jacobi.” The words sound heavy, defeated, and Jacobi doesn’t understand why.

“So she’s here,” he replies, finishing what clearly must have been Kepler’s thought process. He gives Maxwell’s shoulder a shake, first gently, then harder. “Come on, Maxwell, the _one_ time I don’t want you to be asleep.”

“Jacobi,” Kepler starts, but when Jacobi glances up, he’s met with nothing more for a long time. His attention turns back to Maxwell. His shaking gets more intense.

He mutters, “Come on,” and again, Kepler says, “Jacobi.”

When he glances up this time, grip on Maxwell’s shoulder too tight, eyes childishly wide, Kepler tells him, “Maxwell likely suffered a neural breakdown on both ends of the connection due to the sudden and unexpected removal of the link. Too much of her was in her body, and too much of her was in the system.”

“So?” Jacobi says it almost as a challenge. It’s like he knows what’s coming before Kepler says it. He doesn’t, though, he doesn’t know, can’t even begin to guess, because there’s one possibility but it’s so intolerable, so _unfathomable_ –

“She’s dead,” Kepler says. His voice is empty, removed, echoing around the room like some Ghost of Christmas Fuck You, and the ground drops from beneath Jacobi’s feet when he repeats himself. “She’s dead.”

A beat.

“No,” Jacobi says slowly, “no, she’s not – she just –”

His attention turns back on Maxwell, and he grips at her with both hands, now, shaking a limp body, heart in his throat and – there’s nothing, no movement, just a head lolling to the side and eyelids that no longer flutter, fingers that no longer twitch, just Maxwell. Just dead.

Just Jacobi, hanging onto her pathetically, his mind taking him to so many weeks before when he clutched at another body, another promise to protect, another friend he let down.

Jacobi wonders if he’s going to throw up. He doesn’t. He just sinks to his knees, on the ground, hands still clinging onto anything they can reach, a hand, a fistful of her shirt, and he bows his head, worshipful beneath a wrathful god – she doesn’t smite him, nobody smites him, it’s just him and his unanswered prayers written into the shaking of his shoulders, the heaving of his breaths, the clutch of his fingers and _he killed Maxwell_.

Kepler’s saying something. Jacobi doesn’t care. He hears him, but listens to none of it, aware of a voice that calls his name and says indecipherable words, incomprehensible words, words that sound so foreign he has to wonder if they’re even in a language he can read. He doesn’t listen. He just rests his forehead on Maxwell’s knee, still holding her hand, still gripping her shirt, his eyes closed and his breaths evening out, slowly, surely.

He raises his head, eventually, but it feels heavy and wrong and _not his_. Kepler says something else. Jacobi stands up, ignoring him still, letting go of Maxwell and wiping a hand down his face.

“Fuck,” he whispers, and then, “ _fuck_.”

If he weren’t so numb, there might have been tears, but he’s scared there aren’t any left to fall.

Finally, he hears Kepler’s voice, streaming through the speakers. “Jacobi? Jacobi, look up. Jacobi. Come on – _Daniel_.” There’s no emotion in his voice, nothing weighing him down, nothing in his tone to even suggest that he just watched his friend die.

Kepler calculates, with his tone and his words and his choices, but apparently none of his incredible AI mathematics were able to predict this outcome. Jacobi turns on his heels, away from Maxwell, away from a sight he never wants to see again, eyes screwed shut tightly. He looks up, focuses on the trapdoor in the ceiling, and says dully, “I wanna go to the roof.”

This stops Kepler in his tracks, seemingly. “You… what?”

“I wanna – I need to get to the roof,” Jacobi says. “Give me the stairs.”

“Why?” Kepler asks, cautious – no, _suspicious_.

Jacobi sighs. “Because there’s gotta be someone out there who can fix her,” he says, voice tight, “and I have to – I have to find them. If there’s even a _chance_ one of those scientists made it out of these labs, if there’s a chance they can –”

“Jacobi,” Kepler interrupts, exasperated, but Jacobi carries on.

“They can put her back together, if someone can, I have to –” His voice cracks. He hesitates. “Let me onto the roof.”

“You can’t leave me here,” replies Kepler, and Jacobi lets out a short bark of laughter. It’s cold. He doesn’t like the sound of his own voice right now.

Still, he replies, icily, “I can do whatever the hell I want. I can restrict your access to this room, and I can manually open the stairs up myself if I have to, so –”

The stairs begin to lower. Mechanisms whirr into action, unfolding them step by step, and the moment they touch the ground, Jacobi begins to walk up. Kepler’s voice follows him, louder as he climbs higher, projecting through the entirety of the seven labs he still has access to. “Jacobi,” he calls insistently, “you can’t _leave me_ –”

“I can do,” Jacobi repeats, “whatever the hell I want.” His hands are shaking – they’re shaking so badly. He reaches the helicopter, opening the door, refusing to relish in the feeling of the sharp ocean breeze skating across his skin before he slides inside and slams it shut.

Deep breath.

_You killed Maxwell –_

Deep breath. He can fix this. He has to fix this.

He starts the engine, wills his hands to stop shaking, and glances out of the window one last time to see the laboratories, floating on the water as though they aren’t monsters, death traps, _murderers_.

The helicopter lifts, and Jacobi, breaths still trembling, hands still shaking, flicks on the navigation to tell him which direction to go. The system starts up. There’s a tube of Pringles on the seat next to him. Maxwell’s sunglasses have been abandoned on the seat, too, and he looks away.

However, Jacobi isn’t met with the familiar voice of the helicopter’s satellite navigation, he’s met with another familiar voice. Too familiar. _Horribly_ familiar. A voice he left by that staircase, a voice that can’t be here right now, a voice he needs to be far, _far_ away from –

“Jacobi,” Kepler says, calmly, “I told you already. I interfaced with the helicopter.”

Jacobi feels sick. “Fine,” he says. “Let’s see how far you can go. Gotta lose signal at some point, right?”

He begins to move the helicopter forward, in a direction, _any_ direction, _he has to get out of here_ – but the wheel jams in his hands, the controls freezing under him. “I don’t like it when you ignore me,” Kepler says, and Jacobi’s fingers tighten on the wheel.

“Let me go.”

“Just,” and something in Kepler’s voice sounds desperate, now, afraid, “just come back, and we can work this out – together. Jacobi, we can do this _together_.”

Jacobi closes his eyes against the words he’s longed to hear for years, lips twisting bitterly, painfully, twisting so not to cry in this moment because – “I have to go, sir, let me _go_.”

With that last word, he wrenches the wheel, forces down the controls, ignores the AI interfacing with his helicopter to fly away, and he thinks he’s going to make it, thinks he can escape can get out of here, can find a way home and then find a way to save Maxwell –

Kepler wrestles the control from him again, and he fights him, grunting with the force of trying to move the mechanisms, trying to overcome Kepler’s control of the helicopter, trying to _get out_.

When the engine stutters to a halt, they both freeze. Something bursts into flames behind Jacobi, clearly unable to deal with the exertion of two competing controls, and before Jacobi knows what to do, how to stop it, he’s plummeting for the water.

He closes his eyes.

A shout escapes his lips when they hit the surface of the ocean, plunging into the depths, scrabbling for useless controls to make a combusted engine whirr back to life. It doesn’t work. Of course it doesn’t work.

Kepler says something, sounding distressed, but Jacobi’s eyes are on the window in front of him, on the water, _always back to the water_.

He thinks he sees the same fish he saw from Six, the ones he watched with Maxwell while Kepler listed their names above them. A sob escapes him. He lets go of the wheel.

The glass is only thin. It’ll crack under the pressure soon enough. Jacobi watches himself in his reflection on the window, eyes wide, hair mussed, lips parted. Hands shaking. “I’ve got seconds,” he says factually. “Colonel, when the glass breaks, the helicopter’s gonna drag me down with it.”

“Swim for the surface,” Kepler replies, urgent, _afraid?_ He can’t be. He has nothing to be scared of. “Jacobi, kick for the surface and swim up, no matter what.”

There’s a pause.

Jacobi is tired. He’s tired, he’s mortal, he’s human, and he killed Maxwell.

“No.”

Before Kepler can say anything, argue with him, Jacobi continues talking. Precious oxygen, wasted. Moments to spare, so much to say, no idea how to talk. Eventually, somehow, for some reason, he settles on murmuring, “We could’ve been something, right?”

The glass splinters around him, and he shuts his eyes. “We could’ve –”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> again, thank you soooo much for reading this, it was ... a Journey. but it was also a journey i managed to write within a week, which i'm pretty proud of, ngl. 
> 
> MASSIVE thanks to erik, who actually supported me on building the kaipler storyline in the first place, and BIG thanks to ai, fabia, lou, evi, alicia, bri, and everyone else on the w359 discord server who actually supported my overactive ass with any and all feedback this past week. <3

**Author's Note:**

> as always, if you liked this, find me @aihera on tumblr!!


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